Crash Victim Marina Keegan's Essays, Stories In New Book 'Opposite of Loneliness'

FRANK RIZZO, frizzo@courant.comThe Hartford Courant

Nearly two years after her death in a car accident days after graduating from Yale, Marina Keegan's essays and stories are being published by Scribners in a book released on Amazon this week called "The Opposite of Loneliness."

The stories and essays were originally written for Keegan's fiction and nonfiction writing classes as well for the Yale Daily News where she was a columnist. Keegan's work received a spotlight as a new voice of her generation when the title essay written for the Yale Daily News went viral following her death, receiving more than 1.4 million page views from people around the world.

As a senior, she wrote an essay for The New York Times where she encouraged her fellow students not to settle for high-paying Wall Street jobs if talent, passions and dreams pointed them elsewhere.

"Standing outside a freshman dorm," she wrote, "I couldn't find a single student aspiring to be a banker — but at commencement this May, there's a 50 percent chance I'll be sitting next to one. This strikes me as incredibly sad."

But Keegan's work was as full of hope and optimism, too, says Yale English professor and one of Keegan's writing instructors, Anne Fadiman, who wrote the introduction to Keegan's book.

In a telephone interview Thursday Fadiman says "many people were aware of Marina's talent as an essay writer based on her [non-fiction] pieces "but not as many knew her as "a gifted writer with such a range and sweep." Keegan's depth of passion is also in evidence in the collection.

In the introduction to the book, which includes many works as fiction, Fadiman wrote: "Marina was twenty-one and sounded twenty-one: a brainy twenty-one, a twenty-one who understood that there were few better subjects than being young and uncertain and starry-eyed and frustrated and hopeful. When she read her work aloud around our seminar table, it would make us snort with laughter, and then it would turn on a dime and break our hearts."

Fadiman says "people will come to the book because of her life and her death but they will stay with the book because she was a strong writer."

Keegan, 22, a resident of Wayland, Mass., graduated magna cum laude from Yale five days before her death and was preparing to move to Brooklyn with friends for a job at The New Yorker. She died in a car accident on Cape Cod on her way to her father's 55th birthday celebration when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel and lost control of the car.

Her range in writing forms was extensive, says Fadiman, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary criticism, plays and even a musical.

At the time of her death she was developing "Independents," a folk rock musical that was slated for a New York's International Fringe Festival that summer. It was produced posthumously. The show is described as "friends stuck in transition not sure when they'll grow up or if they already have, falling in and out of love and facing questions about the future they don't want to answer."

Keegan, an English major, wrote the show with two other students: Mark Sonnenblick, who wrote the show's lyrics and Stephen Feigenbaum, who wrote the music. Charlie Polinger directed the show, which had a production in 2011 at New Haven's Off Broadway Theater, presented by the Yale Drama Coalition.

Another theater work of Keegan's, a play called "Utility Monster", had its world premiere at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater last June, not far from where she spent vacations at her family's summer home. The play centers on two New York City 15-year-olds who decide to launch a fundraising campaign to help African children after they discover that more than 35,000 children die of starvation every day.

"I can't think of a better way of memorializing my daughter than by having her vision and voice shared," Tracy Keegan, Marina's mother, said at the time of the production.